Tuesday, December 20, 2011

I plant one Habanero chile plant each summer. The peppers are so hot that I don't need very many - enough for a batch of hot sauce, a few more to freeze, and then a few to hang in a little ristra to dry, to grind into powder. I've learned that even those I have to harvest green, if full-size, can be left out on the counter in a bowl and will ripen to orange.

This past summer my one plant did really well, for my climate, anyway. My hot sauce recipe makes 1 quart but this year I had enough Habaneros for all my own uses plus a second quart of sauce. I just reuse the same bottles for my own hot sauce, but needed to find some way to package that second quart to give away as Christmas gifts. I found a bottle company on-line here, and ordered a case of 12 5-ounce sauce bottles plus the drip shaker inserts, tax and delivery, for $20.

I sterilized and filled 6 bottles, storing the other half-case for the next time I get a bumper crop. Since the sauce is such a pretty yellow-orange color, I decided to call it Sunshine Hot Sauce (not quite as hot as the sun, but close), and created a label to fit on 2" x 4" shipping labels. The labels were a little taller than the flat side of the bottles, so they're pleated a bit on the curves top and bottom, but I like the way they look. In fact, a couple of the people I've given them to are amazed when they realize that it's something I made myself, instead of a professional company product.

The recipe is one I invented, adapted from my Jalapeno hot sauce recipe combined with the memory of a hot sauce I bought in Belize. Sorry, but I think I'll keep this one a secret for now - and maybe check into its commercial possibilities.

Yellowish hot sauces aren't less spicy than the usual red ones. It's somehow deceiving in color, since habaneros are exceptionally hot. So I would advise you to put only a little bit of that on a dish and prepare lots of water.

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Welcome to Firesign Farm!

writing about sustainability and simple living, high-desert gardening trials and tribulations, canning recipes and home cooking, sewing and other thrifty arts (occasionally, a personal fascination gets thrown into the mix, too).

Sadge (rhymes with badge, short for Sagittarius) and sweet husband Aries live on their semi-rural acre, watching as urban sprawl creeps ever closer. Can wood heat, gardens, clotheslines, and chickens co-exist with strip malls and high-density housing next door?

Where is Firesign Farm?High-desert northern Nevada, near Carson City, the state capital: just 30 minutes drive from Lake Tahoe and the California state line to the west, Reno to the north, and Virginia City and the Comstock Lode to the east.

Notable Quote

Nay, the ordinary things in Nature would be greater miracles than the extraordinary, which we admire most, if they were done but once.~John Donne

After I read the Little House on the Prairie books, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a pioneer - living off the land, in a cozy little home where my husband and I made everything in it. That dream never died. I did what I could, when I could. And then I met Aries – a fellow pioneer spirit. He started with a tiny house (all the plumbing on one wall of the kitchen – from the sink you’d walk through the shower stall to get to the toilet). He built a garage and added on a bedroom and bathroom. After we were married, we did all the work to turn it into a cozy home – wallpapering, sewing, building furniture, everything from laying floor tiles to texturing the ceiling. This isn't really a farm - it’s an urban homestead, on a little over an acre (half of that still just sand and sagebrush). But over the years we’ve raised horses, a goat, a pig, rabbits, ducks, geese, bees, chickens and guinea fowl (only the latter two here now). I dug up the horse corral with a pitchfork to put in a garden; we used our wedding present money to buy fruit trees. Through canning, dehydrating and cellaring, I rarely buy produce from the store. I'd say my childhood dream came true.